There was a time when I believed space was empty, that the silence between systems meant there was nothing there to hear it. That was before I started noticing the small inconsistencies—the delay in a response that should have been instant, the feeling of being observed in places where no one appeared on scan, the way certain systems seemed quieter than others, not by absence, but by intention. You tell yourself it’s nothing at first, just fatigue, just too many jumps and not enough rest, but the thought lingers longer than it should.
It’s not the fights or the losses that stay with you. Those make sense. They follow rules, even when you lose. It’s the moments where nothing happens that begin to feel wrong—the empty gates, the stillness that doesn’t shift, the sense that you arrived slightly too late or slightly too early, as if something had already passed through and chosen not to leave a trace. You learn to move on, to ignore it, because there’s no evidence, nothing you can point to and say this is where it began.
But sometimes, in the quiet between jumps, you catch yourself hesitating for just a second longer than usual, not because you expect danger, but because something in you recognizes the pattern before you do. And by the time you realize it, you’ve already moved anyway.